Priests and liturgists are confronted with choices at daily Mass, usually the intersection of the cycle of saints with the readings of ordinary time:

82. The arrangement of weekday readings provides texts for every day of the week throughout the year. In most cases, therefore, these readings are to be used on their assigned days, unless a solemnity, a feast, or else a memorial with proper readings occurs. [107]

In using the Order of Readings for weekdays attention must be paid to whether one reading or another from the same biblical book will have to be omitted because of some celebration occurring during the week. With the arrangement of readings for the entire week in mind, the priest in that case arranges to omit the less significant passages or combines them in the most appropriate manner with other readings, if they contribute to an integral view of a particular theme.

GILM seems to affirm the virtue of planning a week at a time. Most daily Mass attendees are regulars, people who note the sequence of readings. I can’t ever recall a priest or liturgist making sure a gospel reading bumped by a solemnity or feast would get combined with the passage from the day before or after.

Or perhaps this is a little too much attention to the daily cycle. We get these readings every year or two, after all.

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Todd lives in the Pacific Northwest, serving a Catholic parish as a lay minister.

One Response to GILM 82: Choices in Weekday Readings

In my experience, priests go with whatever is in the missalette. And every missalette company used in the parishes in which I have served print the readings of the ferial days, not the proper readings of the saints on memorials. The Paulist ordo (the de facto national ordo) does the same. So GILM n. 82 and its GIRM equivalent (n. 357) in my experience are generally not observed in the US.

That being said, I will look at the saint’s proper reading and occasionally use those readings if it ties in better with my homily. At first the PIP complained, but now that it is a multi-year pattern they are used to it.